The House of Blue Mangoes (57 page)

As Daniel had retreated from life, he had simplified his needs, and the rooms closest to the day of his death were almost bereft of possessions. But the room he had died in was a muddle, like the tide-wrack left behind by the departing sea. In the middle of it all was Lily. She was remarkably composed, given the distress and frenetic activity of the last few days. Kannan’s mind flicked back to Pulimed, to her brief stay there. Helen should see her now, he thought, now she would realize the greatness of the woman she had tried to humiliate. They reminisced quietly about Daniel, then his mother got up to go. ‘Towards the end, I know he’d forgiven you. Only his mind was no longer his to command, so . . . but he never forgot you. You were his favourite.’

‘Yes, amma. I wish I could have been here while he was still alive.’

‘Will you be here for the reading of the will?’

‘Yes, but I’ll have to leave soon after.’

At the funeral, Ramdoss had announced that in accordance with his brother-in-law’s wishes the will would be read the next day. Now the extended family wasn’t sure whether to grieve or anticipate a windfall. Dr Daniel Dorai was a rich man and when the wealthy die, many strike gold. Or at least a few.

The next morning there were over twenty people in the drawing room. A fan barely stirred the air above them, but there was no fidgeting. Ramdoss, Lily, Kannan, Shanthi, Usha and Daniel’s family lawyer and friend, a venerable old gentleman whose Brahmin caste marks and turban were in perfect congruence with the Western suit he wore, sat in a rough semicircle of chairs facing the rest of the family.

After greeting them sombrely, Ramdoss spoke, holding a sheet of paper in his hand: ‘My respected uncles and aunts, friends and family, Daniel-anna was an unusual and great soul, and that is why even his will is rather unusual. Mr Iyengar has asked me to first read out a letter that he left behind. Some of its provisions are incorporated in the last will and testament that is in Mr Iyengar’s office in Meenakshikoil. This was the way Daniel wanted things to be done, and Mr Iyengar and I are following his instructions faithfully.’

With this preamble he began reading out Daniel’s last words. ‘My family,’ the letter began, ‘when this is read out to you, I’ll be dead. Thank God! For the last years I have wanted nothing more than to pass on to the next world, and God will have finally granted me my wish.’

Ramdoss paused, then read on: ‘A dying man is supposed to be conciliatory, but I intend to speak my mind. I had withdrawn from the family, and I’m sure there has been speculation about it, and now I’ll tell you why. With one or two exceptions I found my family a burden. When I was young and the sap of life flowed strongly in me, I believed, with all the passion at my command, that the family of a man was the greatest gift he could possess. But you aren’t gathered here to listen to the ramblings of a dead man, so I’ll dispense with the philosophy quickly, although I’m tempted to go on as it is one of the many privileges of the recently deceased to command absolute attention, perhaps for an hour, a day, a year, no matter, I know you’ll be listening to Ramdoss with all the attention he needs.

‘Long after I tried to vanish from the daily world of the living, long after I tried to empty my heart, mind and soul to grapple with the Infinite, I realized that my endeavour would not be wholly successful. We live, fully engaged, until we die. Pain, meditation, thoughts of God may distract us but we cannot subtract ourselves entirely from the world until we are dead. And so, while I no longer actively participated in the life of the community and of the family, my mind refused to let go. What did I think about? Mostly, I regretted the things I hadn’t done, I thought about quarrels that hadn’t been resolved, I thought about matters left incomplete. It’s one of the paradoxes of life, and it is something that each one of you will discover, that your achievements, your successes, your crowning glories do not matter to you at the end of your life. No, no, no, if I leave you with nothing else, I leave you with this piece of wisdom – it’s your regrets that stay with you till you die. And you, my family, whether you like it or not, are one of my regrets. I’ve often wondered why I slaved for you all my life when I could have lavished more care and attention on myself.

‘As I write these words I think about the mango that has been our most prized possession for over a century. One fact about it strikes me powerfully and it is this: No fruit is more beautiful, yet the blue mango has a monstrous flaw. Every season a tiny insect, the mango fruitfly, lays its eggs beneath the skin of some of the ripening fruits. The eggs hatch and the maggots tunnel through the pulp, eating as they go. From the outside, the mango looks perfectly healthy. But when it is cut open, dark tunnels and headless maggots greet the eye. I do not need to extend the analogy to make my meaning clear. Every family has within it its maggots – greedy, dishonest, ungrateful people, whose worst qualities are magnified when they are gathered together. So, at the end of my life, my picture of Doraipuram is bleak. Outside, to the world at large, we are an example of just how a family should be. Inside, the rot is beginning to spread.’

Ramdoss asked for water. The silence in the room was broken only by the rustle of makeshift fans, the shifting of anxious bodies. A servant brought him a glass of water. He emptied it in one long swallow, mopped his face with a cloth slung over his shoulder, and carried on.

‘Do I hear you shifting in alarm? Is some irrelevant advice the only thing the foolish old man has left us? Don’t worry. For a family which has given me endless trouble, fights about land, about money, about prestige, about marriage, you should be grateful that I’m not an especially vindictive man. I have left you all something, although you will be surprised to learn that until very recently I had very little left of my former wealth. The empire I had created with my line of patent formulations was a shadow of its former self. People had begun flocking to inferior English medicines, which cost four times as much but were not even a quarter as effective, and business was bad. That didn’t worry me for I was aware that I didn’t have a great many years left. What concerned me was my family and how I could provide for it.
Kaka vuku thun kunjie / pon kunjie
– if even a crow thinks her chicks are golden, why should I be any different?

‘And talking of gold, that’s what I’m leaving you, my family, a fortune in gold, sixty-five kilos of it, that should keep all of you named in my will comfortable for the rest of your lives. You own the land you live on, that was my first gift. Now you don’t need to worry about money ever again. This is my last gift.’

Ramdoss paused. Kannan noticed that he didn’t look up. Instead his eyes were fixed on the sheet of paper he was holding. Kannan looked at his family: his mother, who sat with her eyes cast down, her head sheathed in the pallu of a white sari; his aunt Miriam, plump, sweaty and prayerful, her eyes fixed on the fresh-framed portrait of her brother garlanded by sandalwood and roses; his sister Shanthi, with a tired and lined face though she was barely thirty-five, her mousy little husband Devan behind her; his other sister Usha and her husband Justin, his eyes skittering over the crowd like light on water; his nephew Daniel, his father’s favourite. Most of them seemed electrified by the news of the fortune that the patriarch had left them. Murmured conversation, the noisy exhalation of breath. Ramdoss held up a hand for silence. ‘I’ll be finished in a few minutes,’ he said.

‘When I realized my fortune had dwindled to nothing, this house, a few mango and coconut topes and rice paddies, three thousand rupees in the bank, my cars and the cottage in Nagercoil, I went back to the texts that Dr Pillai had left me. In them lay the secret that a great siddha mystic had succeeded in unlocking and which I knew would be mine if I had the patience, discipline and guidance from above to find it. I worked for a year and a half before I finally discovered the secret of the texts, a secret that will make you all very rich. For what the texts taught me was how to turn all tamasic matter into gold. Three months ago I had myself weighed, on my sixty-second birthday. I weighed exactly seventy-two kilos. After I die I want my body placed in a herbal bath, the exact formula of which is appended to this letter . . .’

Ramdoss was reading fast now, ignoring the stunned incomprehension that was gradually overtaking his audience, anxious to get to the end of the bizarre letter he had tried hard to dissuade his friend from leaving behind.

‘After two days, my body will have lost seven kilos, as all the tamasic matter leaves it. What will be left is sixty-five kilos of pure gold. I leave thirty-five kilos to my wife Lily and the children; the remaining thirty should be equally divided between all those who own property in Doraipuram. To make the division of gold easier, I have prepared a list of what each of my organs should weigh at the end of the transformation – my head should weigh . . .’

‘Stop this. Enough of this nonsense. My brother had clearly gone mad . . .’ Miriam shouted. Relieved, Ramdoss stopped reading. He had been wondering which of them would be the first to end the charade.

Miriam’s outburst broke open the silence of the gathering. A few people started weeping noisily; the humiliation visited upon them by the dead man was more than they could take. Kannan looked around the room and caught and briefly held the gaze of Daniel; the boy’s eyes had a strange expression in them – was it pleasure, was it pride?

91

Kannan sat by the Chevathar under the stippled shade of a tamarind tree, looking out over the river. It was hot, unbearably so. Was a short stint in the hills enough to make the heat so difficult to cope with? The river had shrunk to a few dirty pools, hardly visible through the rubbish and scum that covered them. Flies clustered thickly on what looked like a dead dog in an advanced state of decomposition. So was this what it all came down to, he wondered, the question that had haunted him ever since his uncle had begun reading the letter. Disillusionment, bitterness, revenge, unhappiness? He had looked up to his father, and even though they had parted bitterly, his respect for him was undiminished. He was aware of the conflicts within the family but he’d had no idea that they had affected his father so much that he was prepared to devalue his life’s work entirely. Why did Ramdoss-mama have to read the letter? Why hadn’t he let his father go in peace? But it wasn’t his fault, Kannan realized the next moment; he would have suppressed it if he hadn’t thought it important to Daniel, and everyone knew that Ramdoss’s loyalty to his brother-in-law was unflinching.

The wind had shifted direction and the stench from the decomposing animal was blowing directly towards him. He got up and trudged back to the house, sweat running down his face into his collar. Why did a man need to fight to find a purpose in life, then spend his best years in its service, if all that waited at the end was regret and anger? Why couldn’t he just flow with whatever came his way? Even as he thought this he rejected it. He recalled the last letter he’d received from Murthy. His best friend had written that he was thinking of leaving his father’s timber business and throwing himself into the struggle for independence. He had urged Kannan to join him. Kannan smiled when he recalled his reply – he’d asked Murthy to holiday with them in Pulimed, get his strength up, before he bent to the task of getting rid of the British. But jokes apart, Murthy was right. Youth needed to think big, pour its considerable vigour and conviction into commitments that would never again seem as gripping or as essential. How could you give up on life’s challenge before you had even begun? He thought of Helen, the woman he had fought to win. Perhaps he should have made the sort of marriage his sisters had, played safe, been retained in his family’s affection . . . He dismissed the idea angrily. And then his mind turned to Pulimed. He was beginning to carve out a niche for himself, the task he’d set himself when he broke away from his father. Would his striving have the same edge now?

His path home ran past the well his chithappa had jumped in his youth. The general decay that had overtaken much of the colony showed here too – the masonry walls were chipped and unpainted, the trees that surrounded it were unbarbered, giving the place a desolate air. It looked like nothing so much as what it actually was, an abandoned country well, one of thousands that dotted the villages in the area. But a young man had risked his life to jump across it! If he had contemplated the well’s fate and his own, would he still have done it? He certainly would, Kannan decided, if all the stories he’d heard about Aaron-chithappa were true. Every man’s struggle to make sense of life was his own. Look at his grandfather, dead in a conflict that no longer had any meaning except in family myth, but without doubt the most important challenge he’d faced. Or even his own father, doing his best to achieve his dreams . . . No, no matter that he was disturbed by his father’s dying declaration – there was no escaping the fact that it was a reflection of his father’s disappointment – he would need to fashion his own goals, pursue them for all he was worth. He walked on past the well, heading back to the house. Wasn’t it odd, he mused, that in the midst of death our thoughts turn so persistently to life, to the future.

When he reached the house, he found Ramdoss waiting for him.

‘Is everyone still upset, mama?’ he asked.

‘Yes, they are,’ he said.

‘I was wondering why you read it out.’

‘Your father asked me to. It was important to him, and that was good enough for me.’

‘But surely you could have talked him out of it . . .’

Ramdoss seemed about to reply, but when he spoke, he had changed the subject.

‘You return tomorrow?’

Kannan tried once more. ‘When did he write it?’

‘He’d been working on it for some time. He dictated the final draft three months ago.’

‘And he never had second thoughts about it?’

‘He may have done, but I think his anger took care of any misgivings he might have had.’

‘Tell me honestly, mama, what did he think about me, towards the end?’